How jengel199 started their web page design journey

Summary

Paper.com, selling over 40,000 products is cluttered, indistinct, flat and dull. We need a new design direction that resonates with our customers and tells them that we are the biggest and the best and that we won't let them down.

Company name

Paper.com

What inspires you and how do you envision the design for your business?

Desired Style:
It would be difficult for one design to speak equally well to all of our markets. The current design reflects a bit of confusion and a scattershot strategy. Right now we look a bit like Walmart and we'd like to look a bit more hip and high-end like:

Accepted File Formats:
Photoshop (.psd) or finished HTML

Paper.com is a massive online store with 40,000 products selling hundreds of orders per day that are as diverse as a few scrapbook pages for the homemaker to the thousand dollar order for the business that cannot find 6 part reverse carbonless locally or the wedding planner who is trying to match precisely that particular shade of plum.

The successful design will focus on our main difficulty which is NAVIGATION (helping the 10,000 visitors per day find exactly what they want) and the second difficulty is in eliminating some of the clutter in order to communicate a COHESIVE, VIBRANT BRANDING STRATEGY that speaks primarily to women (85% of our customers) in the many diverse markets we are targeting.

Standards and Advice:

1. Use some sort of TAB based navigation across the top which directs customers into the 8 or so specific Stores of Paper.com: Scrapbooking, School, Arts, Office.

2. Use some sort of LIST nav to direct people into specific products or categories of products from the home page. We find most customers prefer to jump directly into a specific sub-category.

3. Communicate to people the many methods of customer service we provide. They include a Toll Free Number, LivePerson operators, and email support.

4. There is currently a grid of featured product thumbnails on our home page but it is not terribly successful.

5. Our products range from highly specialized Japanese Cane Paper at $20 per sheet to single sheets of Scrapbook Paper at 50 cents per sheet. The successful design will probably focus on the high-end papers in order to communicate a high-end store.

6. The successful design will focus on presenting Paper.com as the choice for people who have something very specific in mind and need the breadth of product we offer.

7. The design will communicate that Paper.com represents a huge breadth of product, and our focus on Paper in particular makes us the undisputed leader in the industry for the discriminating buyer, much as Amazon communicates breadth and leadership for books, but now so much more.

8. The successful design will be sensitive to page load times. Successful ecommerce sites achieve download times of 12 seconds. While we are not asking you to code the page, we are not going to be able to use a great design if there is no way cut it up and code it efficiently for load time.